Deepening the Wounds of Christ
Introduction
Recently I received an email request from a woman pastor intimately acquainted with the suffering, https://encouragingwomeninthechurch.com/about/https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/wa/troubled-wa-rehab-centre-in-administration-c-6519107. Given she was blogging about the struggles of women being accepted into ministry, I began to pray seeking the Lord about Christian unity based om the unrestricted character of female and male suffering in Christ as the ultimate foundational for ministry. This morning at a Perth Prayer meeting I sensed the Lord deeply speaking into this subject and its wider significance. First however we must speak of Jesus.
Re-wounded
Christ’s personal challenge to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side.” (John 20:27), indicates the wounds in Jesus glorious body are quite deep (cf. Rev 1:7). The signs of his suffering were an unmistakable witness to the apostles that it was really Jesus before them! This exposure of a painful redemptive history was a profoundly uncomfortable experience, as it is remains for us today. Sorrowful confrontation with the wounds of the Lord is a feature of the prophetic testimony of the persecuted Church around the world (cf. Acts 5:41). Absence of this testimony in Western Christianity is a sure sign of divine displeasure; compare Jesus’ tone “(to Sardis) You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead…(to Philadelphia)You have only a little strength, but you have obeyed my word and have not denied my name.” (Rev 3:1, 8). The Spirit wants to bless us with the gift of growing into the wounds of Christ and is using every agency of testimony to lead us into repentance to this end (Rom 2:4). This includes the absence of his healing power in our midst (cf. 1 Cor 11:27-32). First though a richer unveiling of Jesus as “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isa 53:3).
Under Wrath
Since the deepest natural human drive is to minimise suffering, believers are tempted to see Christ in pain only on the cross. However, his prophecy, “whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” (John 3:36), was grounded in his own deep experience of ongoing anguish. E.g., “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” (Mark 9:19). The Reformers correctly saw the Lord bearing God’s wrath on us during the course of his life, “That during his whole life on earth, but especially at the end, Christ sustained in body and soul the anger of God against the sin of the whole human race.” (Heidelberg Catechism 37). Self-stripped of the highest joys of heaven which were his natural state (John 17:5) from birth to death the Son of God willingly endured the loss of the glory of God (Rom 3:23). Coming “in the likeness of sinful flesh to condemn sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3; Phil 2:5ff.), he graciously accepted hunger, thirst and fatigue, plus the vileness of dark satanic temptation (Matt 4:1-4. 8:24; John 4:6; 19:28). Physical poverty was his chosen lot (Matt 8:20).
Gone to Jesus
Since it was never God’s pleasure that people die (Ezek 18:32), the deep meaning of death and dying are necessarily a mystery which require prophetic insight. This includes the “mystery” of resurrection hope (1 Cor 15:51). The promise, “the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets.” (3:7), includes a revelation of the meaning of death. The single biblical answer to why it was “necessary” (Luke 24:26) for the Lazarus to die, Jesus to perish and Stephen to be eradicated is: for the greater glory to God (John 11:4, 40; 12:23ff; Acts 7:51). When a famed Indigenous urban evangelist, recently dropped dead on the street of Perth, and when a devout young African mother perishes despite a tremendous effort in prayer, shock and grief are natural, but they must not be terminal. Such brothers and sisters have been promoted to eternal glory, but the full fruitfulness of their lives must be ceaseless intercession for the perishing (2 Pet 1:12-15). This will be a testimony of Jesus that their deaths were precious to him (Ps 116:15). How can the listless Church in Perth come to such a mature faith?
Suffering like Mothers
A highly sensitive city-father (James Goss) testified to our prayer group that when on Mother’s Day he meditated on Mary gazing at Jesus on the cross (John 19:25-27) he could sense in her mother-heart a desire to exchange places with her son (cf. Luke 2:34-35). She would that his wounds become hers. This pure holy desire was a gift of God, the same gift given to Jesus to die in the place of us all. Such deep substitutional identification is a gift we need to embrace. Paul testifies of his nurturing pain for the church, “my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!…the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.” (Gal 4:19, 26) With utmost profoundness, this father in God sees the world as a mother longing to give birth to resurrection life from death, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, we… groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Rom 8:22-23). Such a groaning is a total longing for the saving power of the Spirit to come on “all flesh” (Acts 2:17).
Conclusion
The powerful identification with another person that moves us to long to suffer in their place is the foundation of all Christian ministry, because it is an immersion in the heart of Christ. Across the world it is most notable in women. This present time when the Church is acutely aware of the pain of mothering, both through the suffering of Ukrainian and Russian mothers, and the death of a beloved sister in Christ, is a God-given opportunity to seek his greater glory through suffering as a spiritual gift, “For it has been given to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, 30 engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.” (Phil 1:29-30). This most precious gift will come to those who ask, if we respect the way of the Lord’s “mystery” of godliness (1 Tim 3:16). Jesus’ ability to heal all (Mark 9:29) flowed from his resolve of faith to go to the cross and hence be raised from the dead (Heb 12:2). Christ longs to share this longing of death for glory on behalf of the lost with us all. (Jesus “said this to indicate by what kind of death Peter would glorify God” (John 21:19).) Through the breadth and depth of the apostolic witness to divine love (Eph 3:14-19) all the power of mothering and fathering by the Spirit are ours; this is the unparalleled wisdom of God in Christ (Col 2:3). Let us pray for Glory to God alone.